The first juvenile mass-murder happened for the FIRST TIME in recorded human history in the late 1970s, in California. In 500 years of gun-powder combat, not once had a juvenile committed multiple homicide. We had a couple in the 1980s, and now it's out of control. So what happened?

Videogames are not "games"; they are mass-murder simulators, Grossman says.

Our kids are being wired from childhood by hyper-violent and realistic video games to be brainless killers, precognitively loaded to be potential murderers. And if videogames are training them to be killers, the movies and many TV shows are the propaganda machines of the gang-bangers.

In videogames, kids are being rewarded to kill, but without any of the benefits coming from the disciplinary training of the Army. And this rewarding response to killing another (virtual) human being deactivates our innate resistance to murdering.

Everyone is born with a deep resistance to killing any member of ones own species; and this resistance is a key factor in combat.

Most participants in close combat are frightened out of their wits, says Grossman. But proper operant conditioning reliably influences the midbrain processing of a frightened human being.

Once the bullets start flying, combattants stop thinking with the forebrain (cerebrum) and start thinking with the primitive midbrain. The limbic system and the hypotalamus are in action while killing; whilst the rational brain is deactivated. But even the midbrain processing powerfully resists to the killing of ones own species; it's a survival mechanism preventing a species from destroying itself.

To overcome this innate resistance to killing other human beings, the military and law enforcement communities have developped operantly conditioned devices using killing simulators in training. Turning killing into a conditionned response.

By the middle of the XXth century, the Human Resources Research Office (HumRRO) of the US Army pioneered a revolution in combat training. This paradigmatic shift would lead warriors firing at bullseye targets to warriors firing at man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit.

Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall observed that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. When left to their own devices, 80 percent of the combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.

But murder simulators produced a dramatic increase in participation in killing. More effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms were developped to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing.

The application and perfection of conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam, says Grossman.

Military behaviorists found out how to overcome our innate resistance to murder; they brought way up the percentage of killers among the platoons by incorporating reactive training with humanoid pop-up silhouettes.

Now the video industry has kids playing video games for hours at a time, blasting away at humanoid targets which explode in blood and gore when you shoot them.

In First-Person Shooter videogames, you pull the trigger and the human explodes in high-def blood and gore in front of you. And you do it again and again and again, while eating chips, drinking pop and smelling your girlfriend's perfume. This reconditions the kids to be ready to pull any actual trigger on any living human. Those videogames should be BANNED, restricted to military and law enforcement training.

I’m off too. I don’t know yet what to think of it, but what’s sure is that Repeat Offender is right in that the bureaucracy is expansive and it could be very dangerous to add more laws banning products; and that Norm is right in that more data are needed to back up the thesis that FPS vidgames train kids to become potential killers, if not actual ones.

I’m sorry for all my typos! And thank you for your generous and relevant feedbacks. I shall read more of Grossman, and will get back to you if I find very relevant data.

Is it only first person shooters that have this remarkable ability to blur the lines of fantasy and reality for anyone who happens to play one? If this were to be true for FPS’s, wouldn’t it stand to reason that other first person types of games would have a similar impact on those who played them?

So we could expect youth who played Need for Speed to be unable to differentiate the experience of the game from the experience of real life driving? There are a lot of crummy drivers on the road, but I recall that there were crummy drivers on the road 25 years ago, and I haven’t noticed a huge spike in serial hit and runs involving youth who are unable to differentiate the effects in a video game from the real life damage that happens when you real cars collide.

Years ago, my daughter had a 3D horse riding game where she had a view as if in the saddle and looked out past the head of the horse and navigated it around barrels, etc in a corral- now it’s totally anecdotal, but that did not do anything to help her learn how to ride. The real horse didn’t have arrow keys...

It won’t be real bread. It will be ObamaBread. It will contain sawdust and a secret protein additive called “Green Soylent”, which is not to be confused with Soylent Green. That’s just a coincidence Comrade! Your conspiracy theories are counter-revolutionary and have been logged. Please return to your cot for bedcheck.

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